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The New Value Of Social Data

Modern times call for a modern approach. Discover how social media’s rapid evolution impacts our everyday lives.

I’m going to make a bold statement: It feels like media agencies are in a battle, standing on the front lines of the media and ad-technology trenches. In fact, it feels like agencies are fighting a war of attrition. I think that, many times, quality and client trust are the casualties.

Both end users and Wall Street have shown dwindling interest—and investment—in key online media companies, including the big players, Facebook and Twitter. And Facebook’s recent underwhelming quarterly earnings report, along with a resulting 20% dip in its stock price, didn’t help matters any.

I’m not trying to declare an industry doomsday. Actually, quite the contrary. Yes, we battle static attitudes and shrinking investments in media. The ad industry, however, is ripe for disruption; it’s prime for a radical, new way of thinking. Havas Media’s new exploration of Meaningful Media is a response to this changing landscape.

We know that cheap impressions have little value and that not all impressions are equal. However, agencies and brands begin to exent impact when meaningfulness is at the center of their media strategy, planning, and buying. As a team, a company, and an industry, our mission is to reshape how we plan and buy media in a way that balances impact, performance, and meaning.

Social media is, obviously, overflowing with meaningful data directly from people. Users who share their thoughts, conversations, and pictures. So social media is naturally positioned to deliver more than its share of meaningful data.

We are on an evolutionary journey. With the recent advancements of super computers and artificial intelligence, we’ve gained the ability to measure previously unavailable metrics, such as brand and conversation alignment. And our evolved approach began with a multi-dimensional measure of success that spans quality, scale, and efficiency metrics.

Listening in on the unique signals received from social-media data, we’ve begun to evaluate the alignment between the POV of the audience, content, and the overall values and ethos of a brand. And with conversation signals from platforms like Twitter, we’ve begun to measure the impact of large tentpole media activations.

We don’t want to be limited to social listening tools that focus solely on conversation scale and sentiment analysis. So we use an approach that emotional drivers that define a conversation’s psychological profile, and how that conversation aligns to the type of conversation the brand hopes people are having.

In this media evolution, the definition of great work has shifted from the cheapest or biggest campaigns, to work that impacts how people think and behave. Not only do we want to help our clients gain more value from the work that we do together, but we also hope to shift thinking in the industry.